What Entrepreneurs Need To Know About Web And App Development

Posted on Friday, June 5th, 2015 at 1:48 pm.

About Jonathan Lea

Jonathan is a specialist corporate and commercial solicitor who has over 13 years of experience at both large international City firms and smaller practices.
For the last five years Jonathan has worked on a self-employed basis with a network of other independent lawyers focused on serving the needs of entrepreneur-led businesses and startups around the UK and further afield.
If you'd like a competitive quote for any legal work please send an email to the address on the home page. You can also follow Jonathan on Twitter
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At the last Pivotal Tribes event on the 27th June a panel of leading web and app development entrepreneurs answered questions from the audience and shared their experiences, knowledge and opinions relating to the topic. The panel were as follows:

Leon Gauhman: Founder at Hive, a London based studio developing digital products and services.

The event was sponsored by Upwork. Upwork, formerly Elance-oDesk, is a global online work platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely.

The panel discussion can be seen on YouTube below. Some of the things covered were the importance of having a technical co-founder, how entrepreneurs need to do as much research and market testing as possible before spending money on development, the use of open source software and cloud service providers, how to improve user experience, how to hire the right developer and work well with developers, whether to focus on delivering your product via a mobile application or if it would be more suitable for the web, the benefits and drawbacks of mobile applications and why it is better to develop iOS mobile applications as opposed to Android.

When hiring developers the panel agreed that entrepreneurs should ask them if they have solved similar problems in the past and have a discussion about how they would go about working on your particular project. A good indicator of someone’s ability is to see how much they have contributed to the GitHub and Stack Overflow communities. On GitHub you should ask someone technical to comment on the quality of a developer’s code that appears there, while on Stack Overflow you should see whether the developer you want to hire is the type of person who is asking the questions or giving the answers.

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